Richard A Jacobson

Coming Soon!

R[age is a gallery show that explores the tension between aging and identity, in a society obsessed with youth and technology. Inspired by Dylan Thomas’ poem Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, this exhibition challenges the notion that growing older means fading away. Instead, it celebrates the wisdom, defiance, and power that come with time.

This is more than an exhibition, it’s a conversation. A reckoning. A refusal to be erased.

Written in Dirt and Rust

Oil on Panel

152.4 cm (60 in) x 91.4 cm (36 in)

What does time leave behind, and how do you measure the strength that persists when everything else fades?

Time leaves its mark on everything it touches, on machines, on landscapes, on people. Written in Dirt and Rust is a reflection on endurance, on the strength that remains even as the years settle like dust. This excavator, once a force of power and precision, now stands weathered but unbroken, its history etched in the rusted metal and the earth it once moved.

There’s a quiet resilience in things built to last, a testament to the hands that guided them and the work they carried out. Even as decay sets in, memory holds fast. The past lingers in the worn steel, in the dirt pressed deep into every surface. This is not just a machine; it is a witness, a storyteller, a monument to effort and time.

FIG. 1, FIG.2 

Chiffon, wood, dye, metal rods, resin, acrylic paint

243.84 cm (96 in) X 121.92 cm (48 in) x 86.36 cm (34 in)

What exists between presence and absence? How do you move when you are neither fully here nor gone? Two bodies hang in translucent silk, answering to air more than to weight. Above, a pale form that seems to belong to light. Below, it's darker counterpart that keeps close to the floor. They face, they do not meet. A draft unfastens them, turns figure to blur and back again.
The space between them holds the question, not the answer. Separation or return, farewell or descent, a pause that lengthens until it feels like a place. FIG. 1, FIG. 2 keep the body from settling into certainty. It lingers where gravity can be argued with, where memory can fail, where what remains is not quite form and not yet gone.

The unimaginable idea of birth in the mind of the dead

Resin, wood

30.48 cm (12 in) x 21.59 cm (8.5 in) x 20.32 cm (8 in)

What is born from the place where life ends?
How thin is the boundary between creation and decay?

Within the translucent skull, a blue form hovers, fragile and luminous, yet unresolved. Death’s vessel becomes a cradle, holding the echo of beginnings within its permanence.

The resin makes porous what we think solid: birth and death, presence and absence, creation and dissolution collapse into one. Here, the end does not silence but germinates, making space for the possibility of return.

The skull becomes both reliquary and womb, a reminder that the cycle of existence is never singular, each ending carrying within it the seed of what comes next.

The view from here  

Resin, acrylic, vintage photos, wood

22.86 cm (9 in) x 21.59 cm (8.5 in) x 38.1 cm (15 in)

 What remains when memory distorts?
Why is there solace in what you cannot hold?

Within the translucent cast, fragments of the past drift, blurred and partial. They hover above the weight of stone, a fragile vision fixed toward what cannot be avoided.

The resin preserves yet warps, catching pieces of lives already receding. The rod steadies that gaze, thin and almost unseen, a tenuous tether between what endures and what ends.

Finality waits, inevitable and still. Memory lingers, imperfect and shifting, fragile yet insistent. Between them lies the contradiction, solace in what slips away, terror in what cannot.

…and we all fall  

Resin, acrylic, vintage photos, wood

30.48 cm (12 in) x 21.59 cm (8.5 in) x 38.1 cm (15 in)

What is left behind when memory and identity dissolve?

“…and we all fall” explores the liminal space between memory, identity, and mortality. The suspended resin face, embedded with fragments of aged photographs, embodies the spectral persistence of lineage, simultaneously revealing and concealing the imprint of generational memory. Beneath the weight of the concrete slab, reminiscent of a tombstone, anchors the ephemeral in stark materiality, grounding the transient echoes of the past in the inevitability of physical decline. The slender acrylic rod, barely perceptible, serves as a fragile conduit between realms, evoking the delicate tension that threads existence to remembrance. In its interplay of transparency and mass, presence and absence, the work contemplates the precarity of legacy, inviting reflection on the slow dissolution of identity into the foundations of collective memory.

Fig 027-A (Young) Fig 027-B (Aged) Subject: Racheal

silk, cyanotype, silver point, graphite, acrylic paint, wood

35.56 cm (14 in) x 35.56 cm (14 in)

How old are you inside?

How do we reconcile the aging body with the unchanging sense of self, and how are we shaped by the judgments of others?

These works explore the intersection of biology and perception, exposing how society reframes aging not as an inevitability, but as a failure. The body alters, skin loosens, features shift, yet the heavier weight comes from the gaze of others. Age is no longer a process to be lived, but a condition to be treated, optimized, or hidden, a problem to be solved.

The layered portraits confront that tension. The younger self, rendered in silverpoint and graphite, speaks with immediacy, anchored in the present. Suspended above, the aged self emerges in cyanotype, drifting like a memory or a warning, marked by time but edged with exile. The space between them is not only temporal but ideological: a gap where expectation, responsibility, and shame collide.

Inside, however, the self resists change. We persist in our continuity, even as the body transforms beyond recognition. The mirror shocks not because we do not expect to age, but because the reflection feels misaligned with the inner life that remains unfinished, unaged.

We all age. Yet society insists some do it better than others. But better for whom, and at what cost?

Fig 038-A (Young)  Fig 038-B (Aged) subject: John

silk, cyanotype, silver point, graphite, acrylic paint, wood

35.56 cm (14 in) x 35.56 cm (14 in)

Firelight and Shadow,

A Reliquary for Unquiet Things 

21.59cm (8.5 in) x 15.24 (6 in) with lectern 132.08 cm (52 in) X 25.4 cm (10in) X 45.72 cm (18 in)

Altered Book, paper, ink, resin, oil paint, acrylic paint, wood

The sightless witness is sealed within a reliquary, locked in refusal at the hollowed core of a book. Cast in resin, the crow skull is surrounded by scattered remnants, ash from the removed pages, their words forever silenced. Beneath the skull is embedded a text drawn from imagined scripture and scorched myth, speaking to what burns inward: rage, memory, refusal.

The skull does not scream, but watches. The pages do not speak, but hold. What could not rest, could not yield, remains.

A monument to the fire that endures beneath stillness, preserving what the world tries to bury: grief, fury, and the fragile trace of flight.

The Wind’s Tithe (triptych)

Oil on panel 121.92 cm (48 inches) X 121.92 cm (48 inches)

Some rites are carried out in silence.
The slow unfurling, the brief blaze, the inevitable release, each stage held, then surrendered, without ceremony. The wind does not bargain. It takes.

Time peels away what we thought would last: vitality, certainty, even the shape we made of ourselves.
And yet, there is resistance. A moment of holding on, even as the petals loosen.
A beauty that flares, knowing it will not remain.

Waltz of Ashes

Oil on panel 121.92 cm (48 inches) X 121.92 cm (48 inches)

How long can you hold on to what’s slipping away, even when all that’s left is the memory of warmth?

Grief is not a clean break but a slow dissolution, an unraveling of the self into memory and longing. Waltz of Ashes captures the quiet devastation of loss,the way love does not simply end with death, but lingers, hollowing out the living. The figure clings to what remains, embracing absence as if it still holds warmth, stepping in time with the past, unwilling to let go.

This is not a dance of passion, but of sorrow. A final waltz with what once was, where dust and bone take the place of flesh, and love, enduring, desperate, refuses to fade.